


The repeated image

by Teatrolley



Series: the repeated image [1]
Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Reincarnation, But not really suicide because rebirth, Established Relationship, M/M, Memory Loss, Past Drug Use, Sherlock is lonely and very very old, Suicidal Thoughts, and he loves john more than he is old, death mention, which is a lot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-03
Updated: 2016-02-03
Packaged: 2018-05-17 22:15:24
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 9,246
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5887360
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Teatrolley/pseuds/Teatrolley
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Have we met before?" That is what John always says, no matter the circumstances of their meeting.<br/>Sherlock always says no until, one day, he doesn't.<br/>Yes, he says this time. Yes, and there's something I need to tell you. Yes, and I know already that I adore you; in fact, I don't just know it, I feel it.<br/>This is where we always start. This is my twelfth time.</p><p>_________________</p><p>Or: Sherlock is reborn into the same life every time he dies, and he finds John in them all</p><p>Or pt. 2: DEMON REBIRTH AU FIC</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. a life

**Author's Note:**

  * Translation into Русский available: [Повторяющийся образ](https://archiveofourown.org/works/6568513) by [Make_believe_world](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Make_believe_world/pseuds/Make_believe_world)



> The time-travel-rebirth thing is inspired by the way Harry is reborn in The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August. Good book, good book. Other than that I've been wanting to write about time, and choice, and memories for a while, so here goes. Hope you like it!

"Have we met before?" 

That is what John always says, no matter the circumstances of their meeting: "Have we met before?"

Sherlock always no: no, you must mistake me for someone else (I couldn't mistake a face like yours, John says); no, we have not; no, I couldn't forget a face like yours (Sherlock, this time). 

Until, one time, he doesn't say no. One time he decides to give it a try; if it goes wrong it's only another childhood, dragged out and worn with the repetition, before he's back here, in this place. 

Yes, Sherlock says this time, in the park, under the oak tree. Yes, and there's something I need to tell you. Yes, and I know already that I adore you; in fact, I don't just know it, I feel it. 

This is where we always start. This is my twelfth time. 

\--

"Time is a flat circle," someone tells him once, back in his first life, before he knew it'd be his first instead of his only. 

"Time is a flat circle. It is symmetrical. It means that everything is as it will be; the past and the future and, even, the now, is already happening. Simultaneously, always."

Bullshit, Sherlock says now. This is his twelfth time, and nothing is ever exactly the same. The only part that is, the only thing always there, a constant, is John. 

\--

Back in the scene where Sherlock says yes, for once, John hits him; kisses his jaw with his fist, paints his skin a myriad of yellow, purple, blue and red. Sherlock simply kisses him back, with his lips this time, and John, oh John; John lets him. 

"I swear to God, if you're taking the piss–" he says. 

"I'm not."

John hangs onto him, fingernails clawing into his shoulders, unsteady on his feet. To Sherlock, it's familiar. To John it must be the ugliest sense of uncomfortable, non-placeable deja vu. 

"I don't even know your name," John says, and then he laughs. Sherlock is twenty-five, and it's been as long since he heard it last. It's a sound like a piece of beautifully composed music, right now played on a ragged old record-player, scratching up the sound so its melody is just slightly off. 

"It's Sherlock," Sherlock says. "You're John."

John chuckles and claws, and leans against Sherlock's body, sagging with his laughter.

"Sherlock," he says, as if tasting it in his mouth. "Hm."

When he looks up, Sherlock sends him the best smile he's got, and John's expression changes. He looks at Sherlock's lips, and licks his own. 

"Sherlock," he repeats. "I'm sorry I hit you. I hope it's all right if I kiss you again?"

Sherlock does it for him. 

It's not often they have sex on their first evening together – they’ve done it twice; 4th (Sherlock hadn't gotten accustomed to waiting yet) and 10th (It was a sunny day, and John looked particularly stunning) life - but they do then. For once, Sherlock doesn't have to pretend that he doesn't know exactly what John likes, and how to make him so spectacularly satisfied they both don't leave the bed for over an hour. 

He puts on a show for John, moving languidly, touching himself and making John watch, just like he knows it’s liked. John, possibly, does not know yet himself, because when Sherlock crawls onto his bed and fingers himself open, John seems to be so taken aback by his own arousal that he chuckles. 

“You sure are something,” he says, and when he pulls Sherlock in to kiss him deeply, Sherlock can’t help but to smile into it. 

He’s missed this. He’s known it; seen it there in the cards of his life since the day his memories of past lives came back twenty years ago. He’s been waiting. Finally, he thinks, finally, he has John in his arms again.

__

The first time he meets John is in his third life; he’s lived to be ninety two times over now, and this life has already stretched out those twenty-five years. Over two-hundred years is far too long to live alone, he thinks. It’s far too long to be lonely. 

There are ways to kill yourself and stay dead, even with his condition, Sherlock learns later. He doesn’t know it then however, because Mycroft is very careful to keep that information from him. The real sentimentalists are always the ones swearing it off, it would seem.

Instead, he’s drugged up to the nines. Cocaine, heroine, morphine. It hardly matters what it is, as long as it makes Sherlock forget the thousands and thousands of hours he’ll have to live still. 

Mycroft gets him into rehab time and time again, and it never really works, but he goes anyway because it’s a way to make connections and it’s something to do. 

John comes to visit Harry. Sherlock is in the shared living room of the facility, and sees him walking down the hallway across from it. As he passes, for some reason, like in a clichéd romantic movie, he turns his head to look into the room, and their eyes meet. Sherlock feels something stirring within him that very instant; a kind of interest that he hasn’t thought alive since the first time he died. 

John comes back into the room some time later, with Harry this time, and Sherlock doesn’t know either of them yet, but he will. They talk over some board-game, Sherlock doesn’t care which, and John’s face gets all tight and tense with worry. 

Sherlock stays in the room the whole time, just far enough away to not seem like he is spying, or a creep, and pretends to read a book as he listens to their conversations. 

He sprawls himself over the arm-chair, legs over the one armrest, head against the other, and spreads his legs the perfect amount to seem suggestive to John’s subconscious, without actually drawing attention to himself. He’s a mess then, and sex is the only definitive thing he has to offer; it’s the only thing he’s good at, when it comes to other people and catering to them.

Harry goes eventually, to the loo or for food, or either way to a place that isn’t there, and John appears by his chair, only he isn’t John yet, he’s just a young man who have caught Sherlock’s undivided attention, and that hasn’t happened for, well, any of his lives really.

“You don’t seem like the Hemmingway kind of guy,” John tells him. Sherlock looks at him over the top of the book, without lowering it yet.

“And why is that?” he asks. John smiles, perhaps just because Sherlock replied, and goes to sit by Sherlock’s legs, so Sherlock has to close them again.

“Addicts don’t usually think something is good just because other people tell them it is.”

Sherlock lowers the book; throws it carelessly to the floor in fact. John smiles, again, and even then it takes Sherlock’s breath away.

“You don’t like Hemmingway?” he asks. John shrugs; it’s a no.

“Neither do you,” he says. Then: “Alcohol?”

Sherlock shakes his head. It’s not a hard deduction to make from that, that alcohol is Harry’s demise. 

John looks at his arms then; not because anything catches his eyes, it seems, but because that is the next logical step. Sherlock is wearing a T-shirt, and the track-marks are easily visible. He turns his arm around anyway, so they become even more evident; there’s no reason to lie.

“Ah,” John says; it seems almost matter-of-fact, but then he must be used to this. “Which one?”

“All of them.”

John appears unsurprised. He turns around, so the soles of his feet can be placed on the seat of the chair, between Sherlock’s legs. 

“Have I met you before?” he asks. 

“No,” Sherlock says. It’s the only time it isn’t a lie.

He sits up then, and puts his hands on John’s knees, then makes them into flat palms, and runs them up his thighs; this is what he’s good at, but then John’s hands come down over his, and keep them still before they come too far up.

“You find me attractive,” Sherlock says. John’s smile is small, but clear in his eyes; he’s amused. 

“Yeah,” he says. “I do find you attractive.”

“I have a room. With a bed. And I’m allowed visitors.” 

Still, the smile is there; now it widens. 

“I don’t put out until the third date,” John says. It is clear that this is very little about that and entirely about Sherlock and wanting something else. It is marvellous, really, how John must have felt the connection, the _something_ too. “And you can’t have those in here.”

“Am I being bribed by a stranger with sexual favours in exchange for getting clean?” Sherlock asks. He, too, is beaming now; John is interesting. John, it seems, cares. 

“Yes.”

So, Sherlock does. It isn’t even that difficult, really. The drugs were always a cure against boredom and the longevity of life, and now that there’s something exciting and interesting settling in to it, too, they aren’t needed. 

It takes Sherlock two weeks to get cleared and be let out, and during that time John visits him five times and talks, and talks, and talks. 

It turns out that he does put out before the third date; in fact, he puts out on the first, which they have the day Sherlock gets out, and is more Chinese take-away and sex than it is a date at all. Sherlock feels more alive than he ever has when John touches him and remains smiling, and it feels only natural when he stays the night, sleeping in John’s arms. 

Sherlock knows, already that first morning, that he is in love. With his experience of two lives already, he feels he can be pretty secure in the knowledge that John is the love of not just this one of his lives, but all of them. 

__

Back in the current life, the twelfth one, they’ve both reached their climax, and John is holding Sherlock in his arms because he always does, because he’s always kind, at least to him, no matter the circumstances. 

“So,” he says. “You did just tell me the weirdest bloody thing anyone has ever told me, and I took it at face value because I … felt something?” He says it like it’s a question. Maybe it is: does Sherlock feel it too?

“You didn’t take it at face value,” Sherlock says. “You hit me.”

“I’m sorry,” John says. He moves in to press his lips to the bruise forming on Sherlock’s jaw, and then stays by his face, as if breathing him in.

“See?” he says. “I don’t know you. Until two hours ago I could’ve sworn I’d never seen you before. And yet it feels natural for me to touch you like this, as if I’ve known you for years.”

“Familiarity,” Sherlock says. He looks up at John from the place on his chest, so their eyes can meet. “I don’t think you’re able to remember. But you must be reacting to the familiarity I feel around you, because I still have mine. Memories, that is.”

“Yeah,” John says. “About that: What did you mean by ‘twelfth time’?”

Sherlock kisses John’s chest once, the place where he’s kissed it a thousand times before, before he turns around and sprawls himself on top of John’s body, so he can look down into his facial features and study them. 

“Promise me not to think me crazy,” he says. 

“Maybe you are crazy,” John says. “But in that case we probably both are.” 

It’s good enough for Sherlock to go on:

“I meant,” he says, “that I’ve lived before. The same life. When I die, I am reborn in the exact same place as I was, and live a life with the same people as I did, until I get my memories back and remember all of the previous lives I’ve lead.” 

He’s never said this out loud to anyone who doesn’t do this, too, before. He’s never said it out loud to John.

Said person, John, looks sceptical, but he still says, “And this is your twelfth life?”

“Yes,” Sherlock says. 

“And you’ve met me before?” 

I have loved you, Sherlock thinks. I have more than met you. You have been the reason for my continued existence several times over.

“Yes,” is what he says out loud. 

John sighs deeply, and runs a hand over his face. He seems to be considering this; Sherlock thinks he’s on the verge of being thrown out and never seeing John again in this life, or having this one with John, for the first time, in the know. He can’t figure out which one it’ll be. 

“So you could probably tell me all sorts of things about me that you wouldn’t know just from these two hours, right?” John asks, and Sherlock smiles to himself, biting his lip in an attempt to hide it, because it means that John is being won over.

“You like to watch old Bond movies when you’re ill,” he says. “You’re particularly fond of Timothy Dalton. I think you find him attractive. You also like to drink milk out of the carton, which you never do at any other point. I don’t know why. It’s a bit gross, to be completely honest with you.”

John laughs. He laughs and laughs, and then he kisses Sherlock again. Sherlock smiles into it, because this is one of John’s ‘you insufferable prick, why are you always right, I adore you’ kisses. 

“Do you believe me?” he asks. 

John pulls away only just enough for their eyes to lock.

“Yes,” he says. “I believe you.”

__

Two weeks later, Sherlock moves into John’s flat. Their flat. He’s lived here countless of hours before. 

John asks him this very question that night, as they sit naked on their kitchen floor at 3am, hungry after hours of vigorous shagging, passing their leftover take-away between them. 

“Do we always live here?” he asks. 

He’s touching Sherlock’s naked knee with his naked hand, and Sherlock has lived with the knowledge of his existence for twenty years without having him, so he yearns for the simple contact. Crawling into John’s lap, and tugging a little at his hair, he kisses him instead of replying. John hums into it, cups his cheeks, and kisses him back. 

“Often,” Sherlock says. 

“How often?”

“Seven out of ten.”

It’s the kind of words he never thought he’d say out loud. John doesn’t look uncomfortable with them, but he frowns a little, and takes a moment to bury his head against Sherlock’s neck, before he leaves an open-mouthed, warm and wet kiss there.

“When do we not?” he asks then. 

“When I meet you during other times of our lives. Two times later. One time before.” 

“Hm.” 

It’s all John says. He seems to return his attention to Sherlock’s body then, and removes a hand from Sherlock’s chin, but puts it down to his groin instead, where he tugs a little at Sherlock’s pubic hairs. 

It’s the kind of touch you’d find in an old and comfortable relationship; it’s the kind of touch Sherlock has had to hold himself back from giving too early on countless times before, so as not to arouse suspicion or panic. This time, however, it is John who falls into the familiarity of them and their dynamic almost instantly. 

“Once we moved to Paris for a while,” Sherlock says. 

“Mm. Did we?” 

John has given over to an initiation-of-sexual-contact ritual by now. He’s pressing small kisses to the side of Sherlock’s jaw, and his hand has moved from Sherlock’s pubic hairs down to his cock, which he runs his knuckles over lightly, before he gives it a single, firm stroke. 

Sherlock doesn’t mind one bit, but shifts to give John better access instead, and breathes his awakening arousal into John’s temple.

“Yes,” he says. 

“Do you still speak French? Do you remember?”

John pinches his nipple, and Sherlock is already almost fully hard in his hand. He feels John’s responding arousal against his cheeks, the position he’s in lending itself perfectly for Sherlock to grind down on him. He does, and John gasps his pleasure. 

“Voulez-vous coucher avec moi,” Sherlock says, and John chuckles. 

“Everyone knows that,” he says, but kisses Sherlock anyway.

“Hm,” Sherlock mumbles around it. “Actually, the sentence uses the formal ‘you’, which is strange–” 

He is interrupted by a kiss, before John says, “Put your legs around me,” and stands when Sherlock does, so he is carrying him, and can walk them into the bedroom. 

“Which is strange,” Sherlock repeats, as John throws him onto the bed and nudges his legs apart gently, before grabbing the lube, “due to the whole nature of the request. So it isn’t really proper French.”

As he speaks, John stops his ministrations for a moment, and watches him in silence instead. The grin on his face is so wide and so much in his eyes, that it reminds Sherlock of the one he uses when he is most definitely in love. Surely, though, it is too soon yet?

“What?” he asks. John bites his lip and kisses his knee. 

“Nothing,” he says. “You’re lovely.”

“I love you.” 

It’s almost the same sound as John’s words, but the meaning is vastly different, and Sherlock didn’t mean to say it yet. It’s true, and he never stops while they are apart, but he generally waits a bit longer so he knows John is prepared for it. 

John, however, just grins, and spreads Sherlock’s legs so he can crawl up between them and kiss him. 

“I’m close,” he says.

“To orgasm?”

John rolls his eyes but chuckles. “To love,” he says. 

This one, Sherlock thinks. This one is a good life.


	2. a duality

The time they do move to Paris is one of their less good lives. 

Harry is particularly addicted in this one, and Sherlock is still getting over the life where John wasn't his, and a particularly bad experience of losing him. 

They move to France in a possibly misguided attempt to move on to greener pastures and to create something new. 

They sit on another kitchen floor, during their first week of living there, clothed and drinking black de-caf coffee this time, and John says, “You know, I like it in this place. I think it might be our destiny to live here.” 

Sherlock doesn’t say anything, because he knows destiny and faith to be made-up lies, and he knows that what John likes is more about getting away than it is this specific place. 

In this life, John is used to his silence, and all he does is drink another sip. 

__

Being honest with John about who he is turns out to have a lot of benefits. As such things go, however, it also turns out to have a lot of downfalls. 

Five years of life has passed. Five years of moments; all kinds of them. The good; there have been plenty those. Some bad too, in-between, but in this one the former far outweighs the latter. 

John is pacing their living room floor, and Sherlock is watching him as he does, his heavy steps on the floorboards a repeated rhythm in the momentary silence of the room. Sherlock himself is sitting on the couch, but his back is straight with tension. 

“I’m not asking you for much, Sherlock,” John says. He’s by the window now, and turns in a brisk movement before he comes back across the floor towards Sherlock. 

“You kind of are,” Sherlock says. John grunts, crossing his arms in front of his chest.

“You don’t have to tell me a lot,” he says. “I just want to know if it worked out, if I’ve done it before.”

It’s not an argument that they’re having, per se, but John’s voice is still tinted by a tension that Sherlock knows only all too well. John dislikes his full-time job at the clinic; that’s something that’s a constant, even if the specific place of work isn’t. He dislikes it, and often he reaches a point where he considers quitting entirely. 

It’s a money issue though, and it’s an issue of time, and John figuring out what to do with it. Sherlock thinks, ‘we could do everything. All I need is you,’ but he knows that this is about a lot more than that.

“I can’t,” Sherlock says. 

“Why not?” John’s voice a smoulder now, and no longer gentle. “Bloody– Jesus Christ.”

“Were you going to say ‘bloody hell’? Don’t be angry with me.” 

He knows exactly that that is what John is; might even know it better than John himself. The request is the one of a child, begging for the thing of reality to be untrue.

John does that lip-purse of his, that is a companion to his annoyance in every life, and stops by the window, as far away from Sherlock as possible, leaning against it with his arms still crossed. He stays silent.

Sherlock crosses his legs underneath himself, and turns to watch him. For a while they sit there, staring each other down, the temper of the night simmering and living somewhere between them. 

Slowly, however, it simmers down, until all that is left is a faint wisp of a flame, and the tension in John’s features leave him. Sherlock finds that he has no anger within him; at least none able to mix into him more thoroughly than oil in water can. 

“Do you know much about quantum mechanics?” Sherlock asks. 

John sighs as if feeling tested, over there by the window, the air around him making it appear like he is something holy, and when a soft smile is allowed to crawl onto his lips, Sherlock ponders all of John’s minor contradictions; how, he thinks, can something be so fully two things at once? 

“No,” John says. “You know I don’t.”

“Well.” Sherlock swallows, and sits up a bit straighter. John’s attention is fully on him now. “It basically observes that behaviour at the atomic level is fundamentally indeterminate.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning that we can never fully predict how something will turn out before it happens. It isn’t predetermined since Big Bang, like it has been thought before.”

John sighs again, but different this time; like he is letting go of the last of his frustration. Sherlock’s point must start to appear before him. 

He stands then, and Sherlock turns to welcome him as he comes back over to the couch, and sits across from him, legs crossed in a mirror of Sherlock’s position.

“What are you getting at?” he asks. Voice soft, now, and gentle with fondness. “You silly loon.” His fingers come up to dance across the nape of Sherlock’s neck; it’s an apology and a comfort simultaneously. It is both.

“You’re never exactly the same,” Sherlock says. “There are circumstances, and randomly appearing differences, and they all shape you into being a little bit different each time I meet you.”

John moves in closer, presses a kiss to his temple, puts a hand to his knee; all signs of affection, and also, the still lingering uncomfortableness of the knowledge of the others; the other version of him. 

“Because,” he says, and is amused, “I’m not predicted on an atomic level?”

Sherlock smiles, and touches John’s knee back.

“Yes,” he says. “Exactly that. Or something like it.”

“Those mean two different things,” John says.

“And are both true.”

John kisses him, as if he was thirsting for it. As he does, he keeps touching the nape of Sherlock’s neck, and it means the simple fact of being in love. Sherlock is thirsting for it too, because he always is, because John makes his insides stand on flame with pleasure, both sexual and comfortable in a way that is not necessarily that.

“So what you’re saying is that I’m an individual?” John asks, when he pulls back.

“Yes.”

“And that I should be allowed my own choices because of it.”

Sherlock smiles. “Yes.” 

John leans back enough to watch him, and a hand is being run through Sherlock’s hair. John ruffles it, and grins a little. Sherlock could nudge him away, but doesn’t, because he finds he quite doesn’t mind.

“Sometimes,” John says. “I wish you weren’t right so much.”

“Hm. Why?”

“It’s infuriating being in love with someone who is never wrong.”

Sherlock’s hands on his thighs, Sherlock’s lips on his neck, Sherlock’s heart in his hands.

“Hm,” he says. “Say that again.”

He means the love bit. John knows, but he grins and pushes Sherlock gently onto his back, before crawling up between his legs and placing kisses up his chest, letting them slowly reach Sherlock’s neck and chin and cheek and, then, his lips. 

Before they are pressed there, John halts his movement and says, “You’re infuriating.” 

It’s not what Sherlock meant, and it is exactly what he wanted. 

__

That night, in their bed, John says, “You must be lonely.”

The dark has fallen over them and their room, but John is there, warm and curled up against him, so Sherlock feels the very opposite of that. 

“I have you,” he says.

John raises himself from his spot on Sherlock’s chest to watch him. His eyes are puffed up, like they get when he’s tired. His hair is a mess from Sherlock’s hands running through them. Sherlock knows he has never seen anyone more beautiful, and is sure he never will.

“Yeah,” John says, in a way that makes it clear that that isn’t all: “But you haven’t told me before. It’s a lot of memories not being shared.” 

Sherlock hums; doesn’t know what he intends it to mean. 

Memories, he thinks, are most complete in their forgetting. John forgets him always, and as he does, Sherlock takes his own and packs them up, hands them over, and leaves them there to stay with that John, before he goes on into the next life to meet the next one

There are still some that he holds on to; a myriad of them by now. But, mostly, he starts over. 

“We make new ones,” he says. “Every time. I learn you all over again.”

“I wish,” John says, “that there was a way for me to come with you.”

Sherlock, well: Sherlock does too.

__

It’s always a shock when the memories come back. 

They do, when you turn five. They appear before in your conscience, like drops from a leakage that isn’t fully fixed, but they have a foggy air about them then, as if being glimpses of a once-told story, forgotten except for a few details. 

Mycroft’s, due to the nature of this, always come back before Sherlock’s. Sherlock doesn’t notice how Mycroft, when he turns five and Sherlock is still so much younger, begins watching him in a different way. 

He never does. Not until his own birthday. 

It happens almost the same way each year: He can’t sleep in the night, because his mind feels stormy with stuff that is not his own; images of blue-grey-green, what-are-they eyes, blonde hair, last breaths. Images of different cities, cities he could swear he’s never been to, but might have seen in picture books and travel brochures. 

It’s almost like a fairy-tale, really, how it happens when the clock strikes twelve.

It’s like the sensation of finding the last puzzle piece and finishing the puzzle, or at last discovering the solution to a difficult equation that has been troubling you for ages; like everything finally falls into place, slotting there neatly as if it has known its proper spot all along, and needed only a little nudge.

Sherlock always, without fail, goes to Mycroft’s bedroom. Now he knows that Mycroft is waiting for him. 

In his twelfth year he crawls into Mycroft’s bed, and they say almost nothing, but Mycroft holds him tight in the dead of the night, and presses a soft kiss to the top of his hair; this is one of the only times Sherlock allows it, because this is the night where the knowledge of so many lived lives, with so many happy parts, but also so very many sorrows, feels the worst. 

“Happy fifth,” Mycroft says, and it’s funny because Sherlock hasn’t been five for centuries. 

“I’m almost a thousand,” Sherlock says. He feels Mycroft smiling against him, before he turns his back to Sherlock and tries to go back to sleep.

“Old men need to rest,” Mycroft says, because Sherlock may be old, but he’s also a child, in the way that those two things can be truths at once.


	3. a choice

Another five years, and Sherlock is thirty-five. 

John has left his job, and is pursuing writing. He’s done this twice before, and Sherlock is always particularly fond of those lives, because it means that he has John around so much more, and it means that they have more time for breakfast in bed, and that John will sometimes find him in the middle of the day just to kiss him silly until his toes curl.

They move to a bigger flat, one with a study and a kitchen where everything is light blue, and this one is entirely new. John develops a habit of eating the cream in Oreos with a spoon, and Sherlock finds it incredible that John still manages to surprise him.

Those surprises, however, are not always good.

He is lying on their bed one summer day, reading, the curtains flowing in the breeze from the open window behind him, when John comes into join him, despite the early afternoon hour, and sits on the foot-end of it. His fingers curl around Sherlock’s ankle; the touch a habit, by now.

“Do you believe in soulmates?” he asks. 

Sherlock puts the book down onto his chest, and gives John his full attention.

“It depends,” he says; he’s thought of this question plenty of times before. 

“On?”

“The definition. I believe we’re good together, and that I love you more than I probably could anyone else. But I don’t think it’s destiny.”

John seems to be considering this; his brows frown, and he does too. On Sherlock’s ankle his fingers rub in circles absentmindedly. Sherlock loves that; absentminded. It means habit, really. It means John knowing him back.

“The first time you met me,” John says. “It was circumstance?”

“Yes.”

“And in all your other lives you’re with me because you make sure to meet me.” 

“Yes.”

John considers again; for a while they are silent. Sherlock can’t figure out what to expect. John has been watching their skin meeting, or the trees outside the window, or the pattern of their bedroom wallpaper, but then he looks up, and meets Sherlock’s eyes. 

It’s a cliché, but there’s a depth there that Sherlock has always felt he could drown in; it’s a depth that expands exponentially as fondness does: If x is ten years together, then f(x), the depth, has reached the point beyond what Sherlock is able to imagine or recall during his times alone. 

“What about me?” John asks. 

“What about you?”

“Do I ever love anyone else?”

You don’t live as many lives as Sherlock has without learning quite a bit about human psychology and the way people think, and you don’t live with and love one person for that same amount of time without learning some things about them specifically, and the way they think and feel. 

Logically, Sherlock is able to realise that this is a simple question; that the circumstances surrounding their romance doesn’t leave much room for other options, for Sherlock already knows how to woo John, and in essence that means practically the same as fate would: the absence of an active choice. 

His logic, however, can’t safe him from his own emotions. 

“Once,” he says, and his voice breaks on the simple word twice. “I’ve known you to once.”

“And?” John says. “Did I know you? Were we friends?”

“We were friends,” Sherlock says. It’s a life he doesn’t like thinking about. “Then we were lovers.”

John smiles a little, as if it is mostly to himself. He comes down to lie by Sherlock’s side, which Sherlock takes as a good sign. He worries; he worries that maybe John is about to ask him to let him have a life without Sherlock, just to know if he could. 

“Did you win me over with your hot bod?” John asks; teasing, but with an underlying hint of disguising something darker. “Woo me by showing me just how good you are at making me feel good?”

Sherlock smiles a little too, despite himself. He breathes out when John’s hand comes up to cup his cheek, and tries to disguise it as pleasure instead of the conflicted emotion that it is.

“It was quite tragic, actually,” he says. 

John smiles again, and leans in to kiss him softly, in a way that is more their skin touching than anything else. It fits the duality of the mood; melancholic worry and fond amusement.

“So I was happy? With the other person?” John understands what tragic means; of course he does. 

“Yes,” Sherlock says. He has to; honesty is his duty in this. “But you were happy with me, too.”

“Happier?” John asks. He probably doesn’t mean it to come out as earnestly as it does. Sherlock’s sigh is shaky, and he leans his forehead firmly against John’s to hide his expression; an ache like this, the ache of losing, is usually reserved for later in life. John’s asking means that he’ll want to find out. 

Sherlock doesn’t reply, but John must understand what that means. He pushes Sherlock’s hair off his forehead, and buries his own head on top it. 

There’s a tightness in Sherlock’s throat, and the emotions are filling him up and tensing up his insides. He only discovers when he feels John’s lips against his forehead, and his entire body shivers, trembles, with the emotions.

“I need to know that you’re a choice I make,” John says. They are gently said words, but to Sherlock they’re what breaking apart feels like. It’s the feeling of a thousand butterflies in his stomach, but with heavy metal wings, dead and weighing him down. He knows what’s coming: “And to make a choice, you need to have options.”

“You can see other people,” Sherlock says. John stiffens for a moment, so must not have expected that. He begins to pull away, probably to get a look at him, but Sherlock pulls him back in to avoid that.

“Please,” he says. “Please don’t ask me to be your friend again in another life, and watch you as you love someone else without loving me, too. I can’t live a whole life without you.”

“I wasn’t asking you to,” John says, which is true only when it comes to technicalities. 

“Yet,” Sherlock says. 

“I’m sorry,” John says. What it actually means is, ‘I do want to see other people.’ “Do you hate me for it?”

No; and that’s the worst part. If only Sherlock could get angry, or could find John’s request unreasonable. But he can’t. He understands. 

“I could never hate you,” he says. He feels John’s lips trembling against his skin, and isn’t sure if John wanted him to. He does hate this; he hates it with a passion he reserves so much it only appears in him every other life. 

“I’m not sure that’s a good reply,” John says. His voice betrays his tears; croaky and thick, like molasses. 

Sherlock kisses him; desperate, bruising, wet, and possibly contradicting everything he’s just said. If it does, John decides not to listen.

__

It was his fifth life, the time that he found John already in love. 

In his fourth he made sure to be in rehab in the exact same place and at the exact same time as in his last life, so he was certain he’d meet John again. In this one he’d decided he could find John some other way, because faking a drug addiction is hard, and acquiring one seems silly when he could spare John the pain of loving two addicts, and do something else instead. 

He doesn’t find him immediately; still, it only takes just half a year after their usual date of meeting, and when he does, John smiles at him in that chemistry lab and lets Sherlock pick up a conversation, but says, “I have a girlfriend to get home to,” when Sherlock asks him about his plans for the night. Sherlock’s world shatters and crumbles at his feet, and John’s gentle, always-kind beam feels more like an ache than it does a healing.

They become friends, just like Sherlock says.

John takes him out to dinner, and hangs out in his lab, and talks, and talks, and talks, just like he usually does, but then he also invites Sherlock around his flat to meet ‘the woman he adores’: Mary. 

She’s kind to him, and clearly loving of John, and Sherlock can’t even really hate her, which only makes him hate everything else more. 

I can’t ruin this, he thinks, when he sees John looking at her, and recognises the look of fondness that is usually directed at him. I can wait. There’s another life just around the corner where John is mine, where I make it in time, where Mary doesn’t exist. 

He makes sure not to be romantic. He cuts out all lingering glances, touches, or smiles, and keeps his body to himself instead of showing it off with his languid movements in proposition as he usually would.

He succeeds; his first two lives made him a master of self-restraint, so of course he does. It’s John who, eventually, fails. Because the only thing Sherlock can’t do is completely disguise his own affection.

It’s John who, one day in the lab, touches his knuckles with an index fingers and says, “Would this be okay?” Sherlock can do many things, it turns out, but he can’t say no to that. 

Sherlock takes him back to his own flat, because John asks him to, and then he allows John to spread him out on his own bed, his own sheets, and touch every inch of him. He’s done this before, but not for half a lifetime, and never with the kind of regretful implication of this. 

"I'm sorry," John says, when they're done, and Sherlock has stopped meeting his eyes, because if he did, he thinks he might start doing something like begging John to love him exclusively again.

"I wish this didn't– I'm sorry it's happening this–" He's fighting for the words but Sherlock won't help. 

"I wish I'd met you first," he settles on. Sherlock closes his eyes and turns away.

 

For months, and months, and months, all they have is an affair. 

John runs his finger up Sherlock’s inner thigh, one time when they’ve been doing this for way too long now, and Sherlock thinks of this as _John_ , John with soft vowels and warm gestures; the John that used to be his all of the time. 

Later, when he is out of these tangled sheets and back in his clothes he will be John, harder and more withdrawn. Sherlock wishes that future away for a little while longer, as he presses himself into John’s hands and whispers his name, softly, until John smiles at him and presses a kiss that could almost be love into his mouth. 

In the end, John leaves Mary for him, but it’s never really the same as it was before. 

Sherlock learns two things then: He learns of John’s capacity for loving people other than him, and he learns that there are no traces of destiny between them, but only the choices of each other that they make.

__

That lesson is the reason why he understands; why he realises that John has to be allowed to try his own emotions out so he can be sure that the choice _is_ there, and that it is his.

He sees other people for a little over a year. 

Sherlock tries his very best to appear all right with it, even when it cuts through his insides. He never asks about the people, and he never asks if John sees any of them twice, because he can’t bear that thought. 

It’s not the sex that he minds, not really. It’s the fear; the fear that has never managed to quite leave him, no matter how many times John falls in love with him all over again. It’s that ever-present dread that John could love someone else more than he loves him.

It culminates, one late night in November, where John is out, and Sherlock knows where without asking. 

It’s 3am when the front door creaks open, and John’s body, cold from the outside, joins him under the covers and snuggles up to him. His arm comes across Sherlock’s body, his hand on Sherlock’s chest, and Sherlock discovers that John is shaking against him. 

He puts his own hand on top of John’s to let him know that he is here, because he’d never not comfort John if it was possible, and John’s trembles still. 

“I had sex with someone else,” he says. Oh. Sherlock swallows, and tries to stop the images from being conjured up in his mind. 

“You’re allowed to do that,” he says. That is the negotiated deal. John’s nose, cold, presses into his neck, and sniffles as if breathing him in.

“It’s the first time,” John says. “I’ve never done that before.”

“And?” 

Sherlock dreads the answer. This could be the worst moment of all of his lives, he realises. The one where John tells him to go and stay gone, in all of them. He’d abide, because if there’s something he could never do, it’s disrespect John’s decisions about himself.

But John, oh John; John loves him more than any of them probably realise, or maybe it just is faith, and their fitting into each other is a match made by the Gods of the Ancient Greece:

“I want monogamy back,” John says. 

Relief feels a lot like weight shredded, and loss not had.


	4. a memory / a forgetting

They’re forty then, and still in their flat with the light blue kitchen, and Sherlock didn’t know he could love John more than he already did, but the shared knowledge of their past adds something it will pain him to lose, in the next life. 

He doesn’t think about that now. He thinks of John instead, and what it feels like not to feel fear in the face of affection any more. 

There’s a breakfast then, toast and black coffee, and their naked feet touching under the table. John’s soft smile is illuminated by the brightness of the winter morning sun. 

The hair beginning to tint grey is almost white in this light. John goes slowly, always. Sherlock’s own greying starts late and takes shorter time. John will probably tease him about it.

There are wrinkles too, deepened with age and laughter by John’s eyes, although this is only the beginning. Sherlock is proud of those ones, the ones made from joy; they are the evidence he measures his success in making John a happy man by, each time old age comes around for them. 

John holds onto his fingers form across the table, lightly, and says, “Marriage?” Sherlock doesn’t try to hide his smile.

“Are you asking me if we ever do it?” he asks. 

John shakes his head and smiles and, God, the fondness there is the kind that Sherlock will never get over; the kind that he could crawl inside and live in, until the end of time. 

“No,” John says. “In this life of yours I’m this version of me. I make my own choices. I’m asking you what your opinion is?”

Sherlock grins. His Boswell is learning. How far they’ve come, he thinks. How much change can happen within a single lifetime. He turns his hand around, so he can hold John’s fingers back, and John lifts them to his lips and gifts them a kiss. 

“Are you proposing to me?” Sherlock asks. John’s teeth shows when he smiles wide enough.

“I was trying to gauge your general reaction, but I deduce from this that you’re in favour?”

Sherlock shrugs, but sends him a smile in secret, to let him know that it means yes. 

John gets up from his chair then, and as he walks around the table it seems like the most natural thing in the world. Sherlock doesn’t think back to the other times this has happened, but lives in this moment, this specific one, and turns around on his chair and spreads his legs enough for John to stand between them.

John kisses him; cups his cheeks and licks into his mouth sweetly, languorously, like they have all the time in the world. Like he just can’t resist. 

Then he gets down on one knee, between Sherlock’s legs, and Sherlock chuckles because he is so happy. 

“I don’t have a ring,” John says. “This is very improvised.”

“Go on.” 

John rolls his eyes, but grins mischievously. There’s some of their familiar duality in that, Sherlock thinks, when it takes place here, in this moment. 

“All right,” he says. “Bossy.” Sherlock raises his brows for him to continue, and John raises his brows back, to be challenging. It is nothing but wonderful.

“I think that the fact that I’ve fallen in love with you, like, a billion times–“

“Ten.”

“Like ten times.” Brows raises again. Sherlock touches them, and they fall back down. “Is enough proof that, well: I always will. So I’ll just say that you’re pretty lovely.” Sherlock grins. “And I’d quite like to spend the rest of this life with your pretty lovely arse, and also the rest of all of the others, but you’ll take care of that one.”

“I’m pretty lovely?” Sherlock asks.

“You’re very lovely. In fact.” 

“You said that to me the first time I told you I loved you.” Fifteen years has passed, but in Sherlock’s perspective that is nothing, and it still stands vividly in his mind. 

“I know,” John says. He looks so stunning there, that Sherlock leans down to kiss him.

“So?” John asks afterwards. 

“You haven’t asked the question yet.”

“Will you marry me?” Those are some of Sherlock’s favourite words. John in the sunshine, John touching his knees, John loving him fiercely back; those are his favourite pictures to watch.

“Obviously,” he says. John laughs, and happiness feels like drowning, but doing it with joy.

__

 

They get married for a small audience, and five years later they move to a cottage in Sussex, and Sherlock takes up bee-keeping as he has before. They live happily for ten years, then twenty, and then they are sixty-five. 

There’s a constant event in every single life; an event even more constant than even John is: the end of it. 

The night of the day where John turns sixty-five, Sherlock turns to him in bed and whispers, “I think you should schedule a doctor’s appointment soon.” 

He can’t see John’s face falling in the dark, but he can feel the sudden stillness of him. 

John has dementia. Alzheimer’s. Sherlock knew he would; knew it would come. It always does. In a way, for him, it’s a slow preparation for a life where John doesn’t know him. 

That doesn’t mean it ever stops aching. In every single life, the day that John forgets his name, Sherlock goes to the bathroom and cries. 

In his first two lives he lived to be ninety, but John only ever lives to touch down on seventy. Sherlock has stopped living father than that now, too.

They live with it for two years. John forgets slowly this time, until suddenly it seems to catch up to him, and his memory reduces from being nearly intact to the loss of most of his childhood happening over just three months. 

“Why must the world be so cruel?” John asks, on the day he forgets the name of his father for five hours. Sherlock finds him on the floor of their shower, and gets in himself. His clothing doesn’t matter; he allows the fabric of it to be soaked by the water, and focuses on holding John close instead.

“Why must you remember everything, while I forget you slowly? Why can’t we do what you do together?”

“I’m sorry,” Sherlock says. He doesn’t try to hide his tears; these are emotions he never wants to stop feeling. Only when you stop noticing the ache are you truly un-alive. Pain is the most human of conditions. 

“You know,” John says, “I’ve never asked you how I die.”

“I noticed. Why?”

“I didn’t want to know.” John says it like he doesn’t recognise it anymore. When Sherlock stays silent, he continues: “I want to know now.”

“I don’t know what to tell you,” Sherlock says. 

“Is it worth it, to try and stay alive with this?” John asks. “When we die, we start over.” 

Not entirely true. 

“I do,” Sherlock says. “You, the version of you that you are now, will disappear.” 

John’s sob is almost a hiccup. Sherlock holds him, and allows him to cry, and cry, and cry, while knowing that none of it will ever be enough to cry the ugly creature of the ache away. John tells him time and time again, over and over in each life, that the worst imaginable thing is this forgetting. 

Memories are what we are, he says. I am made up of them. They are the skin that covers me, and the breath that I exhale. They are the fabric of our identities and our existence.

“It’s enough to know that the new version of me will be loved by you,” John whispers. His voice is one of someone who’s made their choice. Sherlock doesn’t have to be a genius to figure out what it is. “It’s enough to know how much he will love you back.”

The kiss that they share is one of desperation, of despair of losing yet another time. It is not one of trying to change a mind.

“Can’t I spare you from losing me like this, just this once?” John asks. 

Sherlock thinks that, at least, he can allow John this.

__

They wait another two months before they do it, but in that time John only grows worse rather than better. Sherlock gets the sleeping pills, two bottles of them, but hides them in the bottom of their bedroom drawer, together with the junk compiled throughout a lifetime shared. 

The day it happens, he wakes up to John’s fingers softly caressing his cheek, and knows that this is it; it is today that he will leave the John of a life behind again.

“I’m losing you,” John says. It sounds a lot like a begging, but it doesn’t need to be; Sherlock is already decided.

They do it in the bath. Get in, naked, and position themselves so Sherlock is against the side of it, and John is on his chest, in his arms, lying against his still-beating heart. 

“Aren’t we allowed a little poetry?” John says about it. “If not in death, then when?” Sherlock finds his jaw with a finger, and turns his head, so their lips can meet while they are still warm and filled with the flowing blood of being alive.

They have to sit up to take the pills. Cross-legged across from each other, halfway in the water, they sit their with their respective two glasses. One for the medicine and one for the water to drown it with.

“Do you think we still have memories when we die?” John asks. 

Sherlock doesn’t. He thinks dead, when it is final, is nothing but darkness. He hopes so. He plans for his last death, once it happens, to be the end of all of his cognitive process. The memories, for him, the centuries of them, will be something that needs to be escaped; his mind, for once, in peace.

“Yes,” he says, because after all and in the end, this is not about him. 

John unscrews the lid and takes the first pill out. He swallows it with the water. Then the second. Then the rest of them. Sherlock does, too. 

John comes back to his chest, and Sherlock pushes the hair out of John’s face with one hand, and touches the space over his heart with the other. He feels it in the slackness of John’s face, before he feels it in his heartbeat slowing down; the dying.

“Thank you,” John says; a mere huff of breath into the humid air surrounding them like the dark cloak of ever-lasting darkness will soon.

“For?”

“Lying. Just before.”

He should have known, Sherlock supposes. John can always tell. John always knows. He really is a smart one after all.

“Thank _you_ ,” he says. John smiles; weak but present and lingering.

“For?”

“A good life.”

They kiss because they can’t not. Sherlock’s lips are starting to lose feeling, but it doesn’t matter, because this is about the principle of things. 

“Tell me one last time,” he says. He knows he won’t have to clarify.

“I love you.” 

It is the easiest thing, from John’s lips. It is the last thing he says.

With his forehead still pressed against Sherlock’s, John breathes out gently, and doesn’t breathe in again. Even in death, he is beautiful. Even in death, Sherlock loves him more than anything. 

How tragic love is, he thinks, with the image of John's death, but also his life, cradled in his arms; how terribly much it breaks. And what a beauty that is spun around it, breathing with it, too. How beautifully tragic, and tragically beautiful; how effortlessly it manages to be both.

“And I will always love you back,” he whispers, to John’s resting form. 

Closing his eyes, he lets the darkness take him; he isn’t afraid, because John will be waiting on the other side. 

__

He meets John again in a movie theatre. 

Watching him in the darkness for a while, he thinks of another life, with another man, who is so much the same and so much not; as always, a duality that is both easily comprehendible and not. 

This John doesn’t know him yet. This John doesn’t know of all of his dug-up lives, and all of his uncovered memories.

This John, he thinks, looks something like a blank canvas. 

They run into each other outside the building, Sherlock says a line, and John grins and bites his lip, looking Sherlock up and down. There is no pain in this John yet. There is no ache of knowing what was lost. 

“Have we met before?” John asks; head askew, lips bitten, smirk on them. He is intrigued, and he reaches out for Sherlock’s neck, the attempt to disguise it by fixing his collar poor. 

Sherlock takes a step closer to let him know that it’s allowed, and John grins the grin of a thousand suns. 

“No,” Sherlock says; deciding right there. “I don’t think we have.”

“No,” John repeats, agreeing. “I don’t think we have either. I’d remember.”

Sherlock closes his eyes, and tries to forget.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, now we're at the end. Tell me what you thought in the comments? I'd greatly appreciate it!
> 
> As always, my tumblr is [tenderlock](http://tenderlock.tumblr.com), if you want to come say hi.


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